Natural Born Killers

Women get flustered under fire. They're too fragile, too emotional. They lack the ferocity required to take a life. They can't handle pain. They're a distraction, a threat to cohesion, a provocative tease to close-quartered men. These are the sort of myths you hear from people who oppose the U.S. military's evolving new rules about women in combat. But for women who have already been in combat, who have earned medals fighting alongside men, the war stories they tell don't sound a thing like myths

"I remember hearing the bullets hit the ground beside me and hit my truck behind me. Our squad leader had us sneak around and flank them. From a trench line that overlooked the field, we laid down fire, and I know that I shot, and made fall, three. After twenty minutes, most of the insurgents out in that field were incapacitated, but there were three more still left in the trench line opposite us, about thirty meters away. We knew that the only way we were going to end this is if we took them out. The staff sergeant and myself, we jumped in the trench; our teammate followed us along the top. I was so concentrated that I couldn't hear the bullets. I didn't even hear my own rifle. We hugged the wall of the trench on the right side. It kind of jutted out a little bit and gave us cover, but we couldn't get the right angle to kill them with our rifles. We resorted to throwing grenades. That did the trick. Looking at what was left of them, I felt nothing. A woman can't be a killer? I beg the contrary."

— Staff Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester, military police, Army National Guard Ambushed by enemy forces in Salman Pak, eastern Iraq, on March 20, 2005. Awarded a Silver Star, the nation's third-highest military decoration for valor—the first female recipient since World War II and the first to earn it for close-quarters combat.

Female Engagement

"Outside the wire"—beyond the confines of the base—women have regularly seen combat as military police, convoy drivers, medics, combat photographers, interpreters. Some also became members of female engagement teams, or FETs, a detachment created to help fight the war in Afghanistan. Two to three women would be embedded with an infantry unit and would accompany it on foot patrols, over IED-strewn roads, and through ambushes, raids, and firefights. They could do what male soldiers could not: communicate with local Muslim women.

Sergeant Kristen Dombosk, civil affairs, Army
The way this war in Iraq was fought, there was really no front line. You could get hit just as easily on the base as during a mission. It didn't matter if you were infantry or not; we went out with infantry all the time. We all had the same equipment, the same combat load, the same types of missions. It was just semantics.

Sergeant Kayla Williams, military intelligence, Army
Women weren't assigned to combat-arms units, but we were "attached" to them as needed. I ended up going on combat patrols with the infantry. Because I was female and because this was Rumsfeld's "You go to war with the army you have" phase, I did not have plates for my flak vest. If women aren't in combat and if you only have so many plates to go around, why would you give them to the women?

Corporal Sarah Furrer, FET member, Marines
Our mission was to collect information about the village: who was there, what was going on. We also did the hearts-and-minds kind of thing. We'd sit down with these women; we'd take off our Kevlars [helmets]; we'd put down our guns; we'd talk face-to-face and have tea. These people can barely count. They have never seen big, giant American people. We look like robots to them. It becomes very personal.

Sergeant Carolyn Schapper, Army National Guard
The women in one village told me, "My children are sick because we are not allowed to go to the hospital at night, because you guys have put a curfew here, and you've restricted our ability to get fresh water." They're blaming us, not the terrorists who we put that curfew for. These are the things that are extremely important to know.

Sarah Furrer
It's very scary, especially if you know you're in an enemy's house. There's a lot of men who would not do that, no way in hell. They know how dangerous it is. But that's the mission. I would die for it.

Sergeant Michele Greco-Lucchina, FET member, Marines
Halfway through my deployment, the female engagement team had gotten pulled back to Camp Dwyer because Congress had gotten wind of this. It was apparent that we essentially were performing combat functions, and they basically had to find loopholes for us to stay out there.

Lieutenant General (Ret.) Carol A. Mutter, Marines
Commanders have had to spend time figuring out inventive ways to allow women where they need to be. We needed the combat-exclusion policy to go away, because we have women in combat.

Sergeant (Ret.) Chantel Razack, military police, Army
We deployed with an infantry company in May. We lived with them; we ate with them; we patrolled with them. In July we had our first casualty. Our platoon leader had his face torn off, and his legs were shredded. I remember standing at the gun, crying while I'm shooting. My platoon daddy is tugging on my pants, because he's lying in a litter below me. He says, "I can't feel my legs." I looked down and I saw what I saw, and I said, "We've got you, sir. We're getting you home. You're okay." After that hit, we realized what we were in—and both male and female, we held hands, cried. A lot of us broke down. I know, me personally, I didn't want to talk about it. I just said, "We're going to go back there and kick some ass." We were going to get them back for what they did to ours.

···

Lieutenant Colonel Kim Campbell, A-10 "Warthog" attack pilot, Air Force:Sustained fire over the Tigris River in Baghdad on April 7, 2003.

On my last pass, as I was coming off target, I felt and heard a large explosion at the back of the aircraft. I completely lost hydraulics. My initial thought was, "If I eject and come down in a parachute right in the middle of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it probably won't go so well for me." Also, allowing that aircraft to crash in the ground just wasn't something that I wanted to do.

So I really only had one option. It's called manual reversion. It's our backup system, and it allows us to fly the jet using just cranks and cables. We'd practiced it—once—during our initial training. I flipped the switch, and my jet started climbing out and away from Baghdad. But the jet isn't designed to land in manual reversion. In Desert Storm, I knew, there had been three manual-reversion landings attempted. In one, the pilot was killed. In another, the jet was destroyed and the pilot was lucky to survive. In the third, the pilot had successfully landed. My gut told me I could land the airplane, and that's what I chose to do.

We have 300 miles to go from Baghdad back to Kuwait, and it's the longest hour of my life. As I got near the runway, the aircraft started to turn over, but I was able to counteract the roll; it was probably the best landing I've ever done. Voices came over the radio: "Welcome home!" "Great job!" All the pilots in my squadron went out to the runway to watch me land. The airplane had so many holes that it never flew again.

Never Show Weakness

Each branch of the armed services maintains separate fitness standards for men and women. "It's not merely the combat-exclusion policy that has made women into second-class citizens," says Mutter, the first female three-star general in the history of the Marines. "The different fitness requirements have done it, too." Several women interviewed for this story report scoring a 300—the maximum—on the men's test. Accomplishing this in the Marines requires the soldier or officer to do twenty pull-ups and one hundred crunches and run three miles in less than eighteen minutes.

Chief Warrant Officer Tania Dunbar, radar-repair technician, Army
I've seen females push themselves past the point of injury to prove themselves. They have stress fractures in their hips, and they don't want anyone to know or to think that they're weak.

Petty Officer Second Class Elena Woods, hospital corpsman, Navy
We felt we couldn't show weakness; we couldn't complain; we didn't want to talk about how hot it was or how much we missed home. When you come back from a patrol, all of the guys drop their gear. They complain about how exhausted they are; they complain about how much that patrol sucked. Of course, that was kind of our moment—"It wasn't that bad"—even though inside we're probably wanting to die.

Staff Sergeant Heather Boyd, Army
I was definitely pushed to the max, and I have run ultra-marathons. Their SOP was, like, sixteen bottles of water a day plus a radio, plus food for a week, plus whatever, plus your body armor, plus your weapon, plus—oh yeah, it's December, so you gotta have extra gear, because it's cold as shit. Physically, I just remember being in so much pain. You want to be that cool Army chick that's tough and isn't complaining, but it was very, very difficult for me. I mean, it's no joke. It is fucking hard.

Elena Woods
A male soldier told me, "You can't fireman-carry me with a full combat load"—meaning I have my Kevlar on, my flak jacket, my weapon, and my gear. He was probably 190 to 200 pounds; your gear adds another fifty to eighty pounds. I picked him up and walked across the compound, which was probably fifty meters, and came back, and he was like, "But still—would you be able to do that with your adrenaline going?"

Brigadier General (Ret.)Rhonda Cornum, M.D., flight surgeon, Army
There are some [jobs] I think it's very unlikely that many women will want, or be able, to do. I mean, if it really does require you to be able to hump 135 pounds for so many miles at such and such a speed, then I think there's going to be very few women who can do that. But the fact that there aren't very many doesn't mean we should have a law against it.

A Disaster in Waiting?

The end of the combat-exclusion policy will officially open artillery, armor, infantry, and other combat units to women. By May 15, 2013, each of the five branches of the armed services will submit an implementation plan; by January 2016, each will formally request any exceptions. For instance, a branch may ask that particularly demanding specialties—such as Green Berets or Navy Seals—remain all-male. Some of the women interviewed for this article expressed ambivalence about, even outright opposition to, the ban's lifting.

Captain Juliann Naughton, convoy commander, Marines
The major argument for putting women into combat MOSs [military-occupational specialties] is that they have performed in combat already. I agree; I have. But there's a difference between stepping up when the need arises and having a combat MOS.

Sergeant Michele Greco-Lucchina
We were brought in because male and female communication in [Afghan] culture is unacceptable. Because only—only—we could do this job. Now, would this have been necessary in the Vietnam era? Let's go forward twenty-five or thirty years; let's say we're at war with Korea. Is it going to be necessary? Possibly not.

Corporal Darlene Diaz, FET member, Marines
I don't care what anybody says: Women are wired differently, and the way we cope with things is different. When I was out there, it would break my heart to see these little kids that would get blown up in IEDs, whereas a male Marine just walked right by. We hold on to things like that, which is not going to make you combat-sound when you need to be.

Sergeant (Ret.) Jolene Raciborski, Army
General Order Number 1: No sex, no drugs, no alcohol. You can be chaptered for that—and there were drugs, there was sex, there was alcohol. It's to relieve the stress of combat. A girl walks in with boots, a gun, and a nine-mil, men are gonna look at you. It's just natural. There's a sergeant who's having an issue with his wife, he sees an attractive female. He hasn't touched a woman in twelve months. Things happen downrange. I've seen it. How do I say this? It's a disaster waiting to happen.

Specialist Veronica Alfaro, Army National GuardFirefight during a late-night convoy outside Baghdad in fall 2007. Awarded a Bronze Star With Valor for saving the life of a foreign national while under fire; awarded a Combat Action Badge for the events described below.

That night I was the gunner, because we were short a soldier. Our convoy was about halfway to our destination when we hit a spot in the road where we have to really slow down. I have the night-vision goggle on one eye, and all of a sudden I can hear these loud snaps right by my head. I dropped down, and I was like, "Shit. Here we go." I started returning fire with my smaller weapons, and then I could see, far away in the brush, muzzle flashes. So I started unloading the .50-cal, and I just let it rock. I can't even describe that rush. Round for round, you're shooting back and forth. It was insane. Then the muzzle flashes stopped.

The thing about that story is, nobody believed me. Some of the senior leadership thought I made it up just so I could shoot the gun. The next morning, when the sun came up, the guys who didn't believe me were climbing all over the truck looking for where bullets maybe hit. Sure enough, a bullet had taken a chunk out of the protective glass of the turret—just a little bit over and that thing would've smacked me, like, square in the fucking chest. After that, nobody said anything to me anymore.

When they gave me the Combat Action Badge, there were some other people who also got awards—all guys. There's a tradition when the infantry get their badges: They pin it on your shirt, and then they use their fists to pound it on your chest—like, "That's in your blood now." It's kind of a thing. But the company commander just handed me my badge and moved down the line.

3. The Hygiene Issue, Kayla Williams
It seemed as if a lot of these guys had really major misconceptions about female anatomy. They were like, "What about the hygiene issue?" I'm like, "What do you mean?" And they're like, "You know." I'm like, "No, I don't know." And they would never actually be willing to say, "Won't you get an infection in your vagina?" They were terrified of it. They were like, "But...but...but...periods!" We don't die without showers.

Elena Woods
A lot of our females used a Depo shot, which stops your menstrual cycle.

Captain Michelle Racicot, surgical nurse, Army
There's a funnel you can get for women so that you can pee standing up. You pack it in your rucksack.

Michele Greco-Lucchina
We all use the WAG bags over there, which are waste bags that you go to the bathroom in, and it's got a little kitty litter at the bottom that catches everything. Once we went down to a smaller observation post, and they were so low on WAG bags that we were reusing them. You would do your business and leave it there for the next guy. If any female that joined was grossed out, then they shouldn't have been there in the first place, and we all knew that.

Heather Boyd
I'm a squatter. That's what I do. Sometimes I held it in for a really long time, and I'm probably going to regret that when I'm 80. Let me tell you what: I have never shit so much in my life as when I was deployed. Because you're eating local food, weird schedules, weird bottled water from who knows where it comes from. You're just sick all the time. You take a lot of Imodium. I did some gross things out behind a rock somewhere.

Leigh Ann Hester
We had to do some things in front of each other—y'all don't know the half of it.

I got off the plane, and this guy walks up to me and says, "Fuck, it's a female. We don't have females in this unit." The drive to Kosovo took three hours. Somewhere along the way he looks at me and he goes, "Females are either psychos, whores, or dykes. Which one are you?"

When I go in the tent, it's like in the movies where the music stops and everyone just turns and like [record-scratching noise]. There's half-naked guys and pictures of naked women, calendars. I might as well have been walking into a men's locker room. It was a National Guard unit from Pennsylvania, so they're all white men. I'm half black and half Mexican.

A radar broke, and I went out in the middle of the night in the freezing cold to fix it. It was simple that time, but this thing started happening where the problems became more and more difficult. I would tell myself, "I know I fid this," but I'd turn around and a part would be missing. There were times when I was really doubting my sanity. I finally realized the radar was getting broken on purpose. But no one talked to me. The higher-ranking people ignored me completely, like I didn't even exist. We didn't have e-mail at that time, so I didn't have anybody to talk to, to ask, "What is going on?"

There was just one shower. I made a sign: "Female in the Shower." But every time I was in the shower, someone would walk in and open the door and get a good look and be like, "Oops!" and close the door and walk away. It happened all the time. There was nothing I could do about it.

Keep Your Mouth Shut

Between October 1, 2010, and September 30, 2011, a total of 2,723 service members reported having been victims of sexual assault. It's estimated—according to the Pentagon itself—that more than 16,000 others were also assaulted during this time and did not report it.

Kayla Williams
Every time I'd ever experienced any type of sexual harassment, the response from guys was always "How you going to ruin some man's career just because you can't take it?" Like, that literal phrase. They would say, "This is a man's army; how did you expect to be treated?" The subtle implication was that a man's career was always more important than a woman's—and that since I couldn't be a combat-arms soldier, I wasn't a "real" soldier. I think that plays into creating the climate that tolerated treating women worse.

Major Mary Jennings Hegar, Air National Guard
I was sexually assaulted on active duty. It was during a medical exam, and I was visibly shaken—which, anybody who knows me, it's pretty hard to get me physically shaken. The perpetrator self-identified [confessed to his commanding officer] immediately, before I had even processed it. When he received a big award very shortly thereafter, I realized the Air Force wasn't the place for me.

Veronica Alfaro
When an officer is talking about your tits and saying he wants to bend you over, where do you go for help? I know men who witnessed females in their company being harassed, and they didn't think it was right to treat a counterpart that way. But the minute they spoke up to say something, they start taking heat, too. It was better just to keep your mouth shut and stay out of it than come under fire.

Staff Sergeant Marti Ribeiro, Air Force
My sergeant major gave me a knife when I got to Afghanistan. The knife wasn't for the bad guys; it was for the guys in our uniform. I'm five-foot-eight and blonde, so I got the nickname Combat Barbie. When I was raped, I had put my weapon in the wooden rack inside the guard-duty station, and then I had walked ten feet to have a cigarette. It happened so fast that I don't know if I would've even been able to use my weapon. But I've watched enough Law & Order: SVU to know that you don't go take a shower. The person I reported the assault to was female, and she told me that because I had left my weapon ten feet away, I would be charged with dereliction of duty. So I didn't report it.

For the remaining two and a half months of my deployment, I didn't tell a soul. I went numb. When I got home, I lashed out at my husband, not knowing that it was the psychological crap I was dealing with. It caused us to separate and eventually divorce. Even after years of therapy, I feel that those two and a half months somehow destroyed that internal I-love-life thing, you know? I've truly never been able to get it back.

The perpetrator works for the Department of Defense and hasn't suffered any repercussions. I can tell you that this is a bigger issue than anyone realizes. Because you don't tell on them. You just don't. I know a lot of people are thinking the military's not ready to handle women in combat because of sexual assaults, but I don't think we should deny women the chance to do something because the men aren't behaving. They need to discipline their men.

Sergeant Rebekah Havrilla, explosive-ordnance disposal, Army
You get a DUI, you're pretty much done—and that's across the forces. Why can't you do it with sexual assault?

Rhonda CornumShot down somewhere near Basra, Iraq, on February 27, 1991. Awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Purple Heart, and a POW Medal.

Sexual assault is one more bad thing the enemy can do to you, but it's not unique to women. At the end of the Gulf War, my Black Hawk was going out to rescue a guy who'd been shot down out of an F-16. He'd bailed out, and he had a broken leg. Unfortunately, about a kilometer away from him, we got shot down. We crashed. Five guys got killed in the wreck, and three of us were captured. I got shot in the right shoulder, which broke my right arm and caused a fair amount of blood loss. I broke my left arm in the crash. I had a complete transection of the ACL in my right knee.

After we were captured, there was a mock execution where they have a gun at the back of your head and they're trying to get you to talk. The gun goes click, and I guess you're supposed to be scared so maybe you'll be more forthcoming. I had nothing to say. Part of the mistreatment included being sexually assaulted. There's a thought that says if a woman with them is sexually assaulted, men will do some stupid heroic thing and get themselves killed. A fellow POW was there; he didn't try to do anything about it. They grabbed my broken arm to pull me upright and displaced the bone. Nobody ever died of pain.

Your Deployment Hotness

Chief Petty Officer Jackey Smith, combat photographer, Navy
When a female Air Force combat camera correspondent arrived, one of the first things I said to her was, "Take your sunglasses off. They have glitter on them. Absolutely not."

Sarah Furrer
I've seen female Marines and soldiers react the way they shouldn't—smile or blush or flirt back or become friends with men they shouldn't be friends with. The second someone sees you flirting with somebody you shouldn't be, your reputation's out the window.

Michelle Racicot
You don't wear makeup, even if you want to. Every once in a while you're like, "I would like to put on some powder." But you can't do that. You don't wear perfume, you don't wear shiny lip gloss. You don't make yourself anything but a soldier, because if you do, you could get unwanted attention.

First Sergeant Nanette Gruch, Army National Guard
It kind of blew my mind when I saw it. I couldn't believe female officers were doing this. They were rolling up their shorts to right below their butt cheeks. Some of them were running around in tank tops and then just putting on the makeup. There's a scale that's put on females. You've got your deployment hotness, and you've got your garrison hotness. A girl that's in the 9 deployment-hotness range—really, in garrison, she's only like a 5. I said, "I know this sounds horrible, but if anything happens to you, the first thing that's going to come out of their mouths is 'She asked for it.' "

Staff Sergeant Jennifer Hunt, Army
There's a joke that if you're deployed and you're talking with someone, you're obviously having a sexual relationship with that guy.

Carolyn Schapper
I worked with a female who really enjoyed the male attention and preferred to hang around men. By the end, she was being harassed; she was being called "the slut of Bayji." It was written on her desk. Her commanding officer didn't care. She felt totally alone, because there was no one to help her. It takes just a few women like that to perpetuate these stories that all these women are sleeping with all these men. I don't like telling this story, because I did judge her, too.

Mary Jennings Hegar
I take real issue with people who act like we're going to disrupt some kind of band of brothers, because the men and women that I went into combat with, I have a very significant bond with. I mean, I'm still in touch with the guys that I got shot down with. There's something about when you would take a bullet for someone that just never goes away, okay?

Staff Sergeant Michelle Loftus, combat medic, ArmyCaught in an explosion near Baghdad International Airport on July 23, 2003. Awarded a Purple Heart and a Combat Action Badge.

We were on our way back from a route recon, and there was a loud boom. The air was full of dust, and I instantly felt something rip through the front of my face. The vehicle went up on its side, then came back down, and we pushed through. We passed a man with a cell phone, which is typically how they would detonate IEDs, and I fired one round at him. When we did a roll call through the vehicle, I couldn't answer because of my injuries. I lost bone and teeth and had a very big open hole between the bottom of my nose and the top of my lip. The roof of my mouth was peeled back. I've spoken to a number of veterans, and we react, I think, in the same way to getting injured. Your adrenaline is pumping, but I can remember being just very angry. I could not believe that they had the audacity to get me.

A Less Macho Future

Jackey Smith
I have been told that I'm harder on women. To any of my female mentees, I always say, "More is expected of you. It just is. Never, ever let anybody use your gender as an excuse."

Carol A. Mutter
Twenty years from now we're going to say, "Why didn't we have women in combat?" It's the same thing with African-Americans in World War II: "They're not smart enough to fly. They can't be pilots." Well, they proved that they could be.

Sarah Furrer
These girls just want to do their jobs. They're not joining these ranks to piss people off. I don't see, you know, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen trying to be infantrymen. These aren't the type of girls that are going to join.

Kayla Williams
Lynndie England took part in abusing detainees [at Abu Ghraib]. Women aren't inherently better people than men, right? But if you look at raw numbers, we are much less likely to commit acts of sexual violence. Sexual atrocities against civilian populations have been a part of combat for a long, long time. Would that be less likely to happen if there were women in more situations? Similarly, when you have these counterinsurgency operations where you're trying to win hearts and minds, is this incredibly macho culture optimal?

Captain Victoria Sherwood, FET member, Marines
I wanted to write letters back to all my women's-college peers and say, "I have found the true feminism. It's just who gets the job done." I feel a little bit betrayed by the modern feminist movement, because I didn't really see them picking up our cause. The military offers wild opportunities for leadership at the youngest age. I wish more women saw this as an avenue for empowerment, because it's really hard to tell a woman who's been on foot patrol in Afghanistan where her glass ceiling is anymore.

Mary Jennings HegarShot down during a medevac mission north of Kandahar, Afghanistan, on July 29, 2009. Awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Purple Heart.

We were on a mission to pick up three injured soldiers whose convoy had hit an IED and who had then come under fire. We didn't know at the time that this IED was placed there specifically to lure in a medevac helicopter.

When we landed, we deplaned our Special Operations medics, but we took a bullet through my windshield that fragmented. The pieces entered my arm and leg and created a lot of blood. My gunner says over SATCOM, "Our co-pilot's hit. We're RTB"—return to base. I said, "We've deplaned two Special Operations guys. We've got three patients on the ground." I'm squeezing my fist, demonstrating I can fly. They're like, "Let's go back in." This time the enemy tears us up with belt-fed heavy machine guns. Just Swiss-cheesing us. But by hand signal I'm telling my commander, "Don't take off," because through the hail of fire the Special Operations guys are putting the patients onto the aircraft.

Finally we take off, at which point we see one of the fuel lines has ruptured. We need to land or we're going to crash. It's a hard landing. We start taking heavier fire on my side of the aircraft. One of the three patients on board, a female, is hysterical, and my gunner says to me, "This is why they shouldn't let women on those kinds of convoys." I look at him. I'm armed, I'm covered in blood, and I'm like, "Are you fucking kidding me?"